pelihu wrote:
If your questions is which school will give you the best chance of going into IB (or any other field), the overall percentage of students that end up in the field is a pretty worthless statistic. It's mostly a reflection of what areas students are most interested in pursuing. As others pointed out, NYU has a huge percentage going into IB because it draws a lot of former analysts, a lot of people who want to relocate to NY, as well as a lot of people who decided in advance that they want to pursue IB. I don't believe it indicates, necessarily, that it is the best school for someone interested in IB.
People always like to ignore their own particular situation when selecting a school for their goals. For example, Columbia sends a heck of a lot of people into IB every year, but it's also filled with people who have impressive backgrounds in IB, finance, PE, etc. We (I'm at Darden) had our sell-day for a BB bank on the same day as Columbia and Duke, and all the CBS people I met had impressive finance backgrounds, and many lived in NY prior to attending business school. As a career switcher myself, I think it would have been really tough to crack that group and land interviews and job offers. On the other hand, the people I met from Duke were more like myself; many career switchers, a guy with another advanced degree, and not an prior analyst in the bunch. As Rhyme pointed out in his MC recruiting guide, the first step in securing a job offer is getting on the closed list by beating out the other people at your school.
So, there's no doubt that Wharton, Columbia and NYU send loads of people to IBs every year. Still, I'm certain that I wouldn't have had nearly the successful during recruiting at one of those schools as I had this past year (20+ closed lists including every BB bank). It's no secret that IBs really like to hire prior analysts, and they have lots to choose from at Columbia, et al. If you have that type of background, then great, you're exactly who they are looking for and will get a lot of love. If you're a career switcher and have no background in finance, you might find it really tough to crack the industry, because scores of your classmates will be clogging the interview slots.
As discussed elsewhere, the most important thing to consider is whether your target employers recruit *on campus*. This is important, because lots of schools will list firms they have a recruiting relationship with, or that they get job postings from. Those are pretty much worthless because firm can post their job listings at 500 business schools - but if a firm has a regular recruiting schedule on campus, that means they are actively looking for people like you. For a mainstream industry like IB, pretty much all the top firms will recruit at all the top 15 or so business schools. Some schools have closer ties with certain firms, and some firms may only recruit at 8 or 10 of the top 15 (not necessarily the top 8 or 10, but some mix based on their alumni base and past success, etc.).
The final piece of the puzzle is how many students are interested in banking (or whatever field) each year, and how many people land jobs in the field. I don't have info on any of the other schools so I'll use Darden as an example. About 1/3 of the students each year (100 or so) are interested in finance, which includes banking, private equity, investment management, hedge funds and corporate finance. Each year, about 20-25 banks recruit on campus and hire about 50-60 people (these are very rough estimates); which means that of all people interested in banking (probably 60-70 of the 100 total interested in finance and it definitely varies with the economy) 80-90% land IB jobs. Sometimes it's obvious why certain people don't make it (there's always a few really obnoxious people, some who don't take recruiting seriously enough, etc.). So, when you look at a place like Darden, 50 or 60 out of 310 students (16-19%) land IB jobs; but the more relevant number is that 80-90% of those interested in IB land such jobs. When you look at the statistic for NYU, 44% landing IB jobs sounds impressive, but how many were interested overall? If 45% of the student population was interested in IB and 44% landed jobs, then that would be awesome, if 65% IB jobs and 44% of all students landed such jobs, then that's less impressive. I don't have any specific data, but as pointed out in the first paragraph, just looking at the overall percentage that enters in industry is worthless. How many were actually interested in this industry? What type of backgrounds do will in recruiting? Those are definitely more relevant questions.
Regarding Columbia - aren't a lot of the guys who want to stay in IB, doing well in IB, etc. in NYC getting direct promoted to associate nowadays and skipping Business School altogether? I would have assumed that similar to Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, and just about every other top school - the pre-MBA sell siders want to move to the buy side. I think Columbia places at least 5% of its class into PE/VC and probably an even higher number into investment management. I would have predicted that Columbia may have a lot more people with exposure to the financial services industry, perhaps back office jobs and things like that, but not necessarily a whole lot of guys fresh out of their 2-3 year analyst stints at BB IBDs (if you don't screw up, you should have buyside opportunities knocking at your door after your analyst stint which are far more lucrative than business school).
I spent a year in Big 4 audit and I am currently in Corp Dev. I plan to switch to either a bulge bracket IB or to a small cap/middle market PE firm upon graduation and these are my target schools right now. I obviously have a West Coast preference, but I wouldn't mind spending a few years in NYC and then transitioning out here later:
1. Columbia
2. Chicago GSB
3. UCLA
4. Haas